Profile Manager Premium Case Study: Community Software for Biolords.com
by Jeffery Sneed
My website is the online refuge for a gaming society known as the Biolords that resides on Battle.net . My main intention when creating the site was to have a central location that would allow me to disperse information to those in our guild and those interested in our guild.
As many webmasters know there are certain challenges that we all face when designing website. One of my most difficult challenges was maintaining an accurate members list. I can't tell you the amount of trouble it was to have to manually adjust profiles via email submissions.
Eventually it came down to the point where I simply gave up on updating the list all together. So it occurred to me that if I was to maintain a successful site I would simply have to come up with a better way. I searched many CGI script libraries in search of a viable solution to no avail. I tried adapting several "Online Community" scripts such as EZHomepage and various other community softwares. These community softwares even after extreme editing still fell short of what I needed.
Eventually after many nights of disappointment I stumbled upon PM Profile. I downloaded the basic script and immediately hunkered down and began testing it. This community software was exactly what I was after with a few shortcomings. I wanted each user to be able to display a picture in their profile.
After looking at the structure of the script I realized that this would indeed be easy to remedy. I made the necessary adjustments and emailed the author Aytekin Tank describing the changes I made. He then responded and told me about PM Profile Premium edition. I was extremely pleased and immediately began to test the newer version. A lot of the things I had been wanting had been included in his premium version.
I enjoyed greatly modifying the templates for the script to match my community site. This community script gave me boundless room for customization and personalization. With but a few changes I was able to set the script up to automatically sort and display user profiles as they are created. Now my page displays the users by rank and shows a thumb nailed image of the user's profile picture.
Absolutely perfect. Exactly what I was after!
Profile Manager Premium
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